"The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows." PG Wodehouse.
When I was a boy of about 13 or 14 my father gave me a book to read: The Heart of a Goof by the English comic writer PG Wodehouse. By then I had been truly bitten by the golf bug and I was intrigued and excited by the cover illustration of an old-fashioned golfer in plus fours looking wanly down the first fairway.
I was familiar with the author to a certain extent. I had heard of his most famous creations, the feckless toff Bertie Wooster and his wise and faithful manservant Jeeves. I knew too that my grandfather loved his books and that he would sit and read them with a fixed grin punctuated by a steady stream of guffaws, chortles and the occasional belly laugh.
And so began my own lifelong love of PG Wodehouse. He caught my attention from the very first line: "It was a morning when all nature seemed to shout Fore!"
The Heart of a Goof is Wodehouse's second collection of golfing short stories. (I'd quickly go on to seek out his first book, The Clicking of Cuthbert"). First published in 1926, they are set at a fictional club sometime between the wars. Each story is narrated by the Oldest Member and generally follows the same format. The OM encounters a young man in a fix of some sort that provides the opportunity to share an encouraging golfing tale of his recollection that deals with triumph over adversity, love, redemption or merely the meaning of life. And always, golf conquers all.
And so we meet a cast of characters: among them Ferdinand Dibble who unlocks the secret of the game when at his most miserable; Rollo Podmarsh who affects the smoking of a pipe like Ted Tay in a bid to improve his game; and the Wrecking Crew, a fourball famed for the grotesque nature of their swings, their egregious disregard for etiquette and their snail's pace of play. It's a world where all pros like Sandy McHoots, Open Champion, are miserable "Scotchmen" and inspiration can be found through the great works of Vardon on Casual Water and Braid on Taking Turf.
It's not just the stories and absurd situations that make Wodehouse such a master, it's his wonderful use of language and descriptions: the man who "folded (his betrothed) in the interlocking grip"; "If Cleopatra had been outed in the first round of the Ladies Singles we should have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness."; and the abject hacker whose meagre expectations led him to "waggle as Hamlet might have waggled, moodily, irresolutely." They resonate with anyone who loves and yet has has toiled with the glorious/infernal game.
Testament to the enduring attraction of his writing is both of Wodehouse's golfing collections are still in print, almost a century after being published. As Herbert Warren Wind said "when it comes to golf fiction, Wodehouse stands alone".